So I was out drinking on Saturday night with an old friend of mine, a former co-worker who also played on my shard years ago before it shut down. We brought up UO and POL and all the fun we had back then. I would create stuff on a development shard, we would vigorously test it and I would eventually move it to the live shard for everyone... There were a few things I would want to do or would be suggested but because of either client or server limitations, they wouldn't happen. As time went on, that list of stuff we couldn't do expanded but we made do with what we had. POL went open source in the dying months of my shard so I wasn't too encouraged to modify the POL core to implement some of those things.

From time to time I do think back on how much I enjoyed developing my shard. I've really wanted to develop again but I feel reopening my shard wouldn't gain enough traction to keep me encouraged to do it and trying to join another team and learn their entire scriptbase would be a lot of initial work and may strain my creative direction. I had given a bit of initial thought about creating my own UO-like game but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

My friend then jokingly threw out that I should use POL as a base server software to start with since I knew it so well. Starting with a fully functional server and just adding on and modifying it with the things that would be needed. I jokingly countered that if I had the source of a third party client that worked, all we would need to do was regenerate the map and redo the artwork, animations, sound effects, and music. Without a ton of effort, we would have a fully working complete copy of UO without any Origin/EA code. Presumably with third party client developers and POL Core developers on board, we could morph the game into anything we want.

Obviously in a sober mind, this runs into a bunch of issues. No third party client I have ever used actually worked well. Although, there may be one that does that I haven't tried. The next problem would be monetization and compensation for those who have contributed. Obviously it would be nice to make money off something like this but compensating everyone fairly and to their satisfaction would be hard. While a third party client would probably have a small, closed team, POL has been around for a long time and has had many contributions from many people and it's hard to say what is fair for everyone from the smallest bugfix contributor to the original creators. And even that depends on if the larger contributors would even approve of such a use for POL.

Anyway to sum it up, it was a nice idea and made for a fun conversation throughout the night but in the end, I doubt it would go anywhere.

Why would I submit it to Origin? The whole point of the conversation was to break away from EA/Origin and be an indie developer. I wouldn't want to be stuck around the UO team anyway. I can't imagine they're that far from being the next team axed by EA. Almost 20 years of development on a game will make their leash shorter and shorter.

I'm playing internet detective and trying to get in touch with someone who ran Crystal Gate UO shard. I'm pretty sure you were the main dev/admin... I actually can't believe I found you (hopefully).

I'm looking to revive the old shard but I need the code base. I remember you, CWO, from back then. I used to be a counselor on CG, my name was Max Powers. I am willing to fund the hosting to bring back the old community. I am a professional software dev now and can help with scripting and getting things ready.

Please let me know if you have any contact info or information. I hope you see this (I can't PM on here for some reason)